The question of sound drama and the pack psychology of a congress of groundlings is a famous one: it gets nowhere. Sound drama and sound audiences are alone to be considered at one and the same time. And, as I have noted, the tendency of willing, or even semi-willing, auditors and spectators is in an upward direction, not a downward. No intelligent spectator at a performance of “Ben Hur” has ever been made to feel like throwing his hat into the air and cheering by the similar actions of the mob spectators to the left and right of him. No ignoble auditor of “The Laughter of the Gods” but has been made to feel, in some part, the contagion of cultivated appreciation to _his_ left and right. “I forget,” wrote Sarcey, in a consideration of the subject of which we have been treating, “what tyrant it was of ancient Greece to whom massacres were every-day affairs, but who wept copiously over the misfortunes of a heroine in a tragedy. He was the audience; and for the one evening clothed himself in the sentiments of the public.” A typical example of sophisticated reasoning. How does Sarcey know that it was not the rest of the audience--the crowd--that was influenced by this repentant and copiously lachrymose individual, rather than that it was this individual who was moved by the crowd? If fallacies perchance insinuate themselves into these opposing contentions, it is a case of fallacy versus fallacy: my intent is not so much to prove anything as to indicate the presence of holes in the proofs of the other side. These holes seem to me to be numerous, and of considerable circumference. A description of two of them may suffice to suggest the rest. Take, as the first of these, the familiar Castelvetro doctrine that, since a theatrical audience is not a select congress but a motley crowd, the dramatist, ever conscious of the group psychology, must inevitably avoid all themes and ideas unintelligible to such a gathering. It may be true that a theatrical audience is not a select congress, but why confine the argument to theatrical audiences and seek thus to prove something of drama that may be proved as well--if one is given to such idiosyncrasies--of music? What, as I have said before, of opera and concert hall audiences? Consider the average audience at Covent Garden, the Metropolitan, Carnegie Hall. Is it any way culturally superior to the average audience at the St. James’s Theatre, or the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, or the Plymouth--or even the Neighbourhood Playhouse down in Grand Street? What of the audiences who attended the original performances of Beethoven’s “Leonore” (“Fidelio”), Berlioz’s “Benvenuto Cellini,” the original performances of Wagner in France and the performances of his “Der Fliegende Holländer” in Germany, the operas of Händel in England in the years 1733-37, the work of Rossini in Italy, the concerts of Chopin during his tour of England and Scotland?... Again, as to the imperative necessity of the